Octopath Traveler: Initial Thoughts

Let's get down to business, shall we?  I'll get one thing out of the way right now: I'm playing on version 1.0.2, which is the latest update as of this writing (I just checked to make sure).

Things I like

All the big things that might make or break the experience are fine.  The graphics are amazing, the music fits quite well and adds a lot of atmosphere, exploring the world and getting into fights is fun, the controls work, and there aren't any gameplay mechanics I've encountered yet that don't function as they should.

When you hold B to run in an explorable area, the radar turns red and your encounter rate goes up.  It's kind of a gamble, but also useful.  When you're right next to town and out of Healing Grapes or something, you may just want to hold B and hope you don't get an encounter to get into town faster.  At the same time, if you want to level up a bit, holding B and running around makes that go faster.  It works well, and the running encounter rate isn't oppressively high.

Mashing B while moving causes your characters to look like they're hovering.  In addition, the top half of their sprites fidget a bit, and you constantly hear the footstep noise.  I have no clue why this amuses me so much.

Things I think could be improved

Note: These are all "quality of life" improvements, or basically things that could easily be changed in that don't affect any kind of game balance, but simply make the player's life easier.  Some are gameplay mechanic-related, though, and I may find them solved by something later on in the game that I don't yet know exists, so keep that in mind.

In battle, your party's HP/SP/BP meters are on the right side of the screen.  This is fine, but as a player of a lot of other JRPGs, I'm so used to having that info along the bottom of the screen that it's taking me a bit to adjust.  It could do with some better contrast as well, as in some battles the gauges and text are hard to see.  This is less of an issue when the Switch is in portable mode and I have it right in front of my face, but when I have it docked and it's on the TV a much farther distance away, it gets a bit difficult.  This could be solved with a slightly transparent black background behind all characters' information, and applying a white border to the HP/SP bars so they stand out a bit more.

When you're using an ability that targets a party member, the game could highlight that member's stats on the right side of the screen to make it easier to see who's being targeted.  It already does this with their picture in the turn order, and it puts a selection cursor next to the targeted character(s); but I still find myself confused as to who's being targeted from time to time and this is a relatively minor change that would help tremendously.

Similarly, targeting enemies doesn't quite work the way I would like it to.  Pressing left and right works beautifully and exposes what's going on: it's using the turn order to decide which enemy to target next.  Using left and right in combination with up and down to try to move the cursor around the enemies, however, gets confusing quickly since the cursor doesn't move where you would expect it to go.  As a player who looks at the enemies on the left side of the screen to see where the selection cursor is, I would like the option to make directional inputs move the cursor relative to that, as opposed to sequentially through the turn order.

I know they increased the text size based on feedback from the original demo, but some text is still way too small.  HP/SP values and enemy names in battle are the prime offenders.  It's difficult to read the menu items from across a room with the system docked, they could either be made bigger, or simply apply boldface.  The vulnerability icons could also do with being a bit bigger.  This is not an issue in portable mode, just when the system is docked.

Navigating the UI is a little awkward for me.  I'm so used to Bravely Second letting me use directional inputs for entering and exiting menus in addition to scrolling through them that I keep trying it here and it just doesn't work.  I would love to have the option to make right be "Confirm" and left be "Cancel", just like in Bravely Second.  Also, a quick button for accessing the world map would be nice.

When using Tressa's Purchase ability, sometimes you can buy equipment from people.  It would be incredibly useful if the game popped up your party on the right side of the screen, similar to when you're shopping at the armorer, so you can see how an item you're looking at would affect your characters' stats.  Currently the only way to do this is to remember (or jot down) the stat boosts, then exit the Purchase menu, go into your Equipment, and compare manually.

In that regard, there are a lot of towns with a lot of armorers that have different inventories, and finding the best equipment I can afford at any given time gets confusing quickly.  I know it's an open world game and having a lot of equipment options that are spread out across that world is to be expected, but there's an in-universe way to solve it.  Your characters could keep a mental note of what they've seen and offer up bits of feedback like "I think I've seen a better one elsewhere..." or "this is the best I've seen yet!".  This leaves room for gameplay mechanics to improve that feedback.  Information or trade-savvy characters like Tressa or Cyrus being in the party could improve this feedback further, to include the name of the city, or even the specific NPC if it's an item that Tressa would have to use Purchase to buy.

Through my extensive use of Cyrus' Scrutinize path action, I've found out various bits of information that aren't hidden items, inn discounts, etc.; but have interesting names assigned to them, and I don't see where I can go in the menu to review what I've discovered.

Things I don't like

I keep seeing the recommended level for areas of the game going up as I level up.  RPGs that scale enemy level according to player level give off significantly less sense of accomplishment to the player.  There's no reason to do it, either.  The player absolutely should be able to level up and then go back to an early area and one-shot everything.  It provides useful feedback to the player, that maybe they should be fighting things elsewhere, and in doing so, progress to other parts of the game.  When you always feel the intended level of challenge regardless of your level, it destroys any sense of accomplishment granted by levelling up, gaining new abilities, and buying new equipment.  Guild Wars 2 did this same thing, and it's one of the reasons I don't play that game anymore.

The saving grace to the above situation is that currently it isn't scaling up very much.  Still, it would be better if it didn't do it at all.

Overall

The game is incredibly worth the price of admission to me.